People often ask the Free Software Foundation (FSF) what license is recommended to use for their project. The FSF has written about this publicly before, but the information has been scattered around between different essays, FAQ entries, and license commentaries. This article collects all that information into a single source, to make it easier for people to follow and refer back to.

The recommendations are focused on licensing a work that you create—whether that's a modification of an existing work, or a new original work. These recommendations do not address the issue of combining existing material under different licenses. If you're looking for help with that, please check the FSF license FAQ.

JavaScript License Web Labels is a format that the FSF proposes webmasters use to publish license information and source code for the JavaScript they deploy on their sites. It looks simple enough to be accessible to any visitor, but provides enough detail that automated tools can confirm that all of a site's JavaScript is actually free. Such software will make it practical for people to run free JavaScript and refuse nonfree code. Tools like this are already being developed: LibreJS is a plug-in for Mozilla-based browsers that will support JavaScript License Web Labels.